Abstract

Collaboration is an ethically charged relationship that challenges traditional
modes of authorship attribution, institutional norms, and expectations of
teaching and learning. A careful reflection on the needs and expectations of
project participants demands an exposure of the seams and social dynamics
inherent in research-driven relationships. In this paper, we ask: How does
integrating digital scholarship into undergraduate pedagogy challenge systems of
evaluation and credit and affect collaboration in research environments tuned to
promotion and tenure? Emerging from our participation in the Scholarly
Communication Institute (2015) in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, this
article presents the findings of a team tasked with evaluating best practices
and better understanding how authorship and contributorship models emerge in
heterogeneous teams of students, faculty, staff, #alt-ac roles, librarians,
programmers, and community partners.[1]

Digital scholarship is often a deeply collaborative and networked enterprise, one
which involves multiple practitioners from a variety of academic, #altac, and
non-academic contexts. This kind of socially oriented knowledge creation emerges
from a community of practice that moves fluidly between curricular experiences and
co-curricular research experiences, often hosted in DH labs, libraries, and
centers.[1] Neither formalised evaluative structures nor
socio-cultural understandings of value and credit have kept pace with disciplinary
and technological change in the humanities. In this context, scholarly work involves
a mesh of potentially uneven relationships between many knowledge stakeholders and
researchers with a range of technical capabilities. For example, student labor is
paired awkwardly with faculty promotion and tenure, which is driven by faculty
members’ ability to manage and mobilize large heterogeneous teams of researchers at
all levels within the academic community. Credit, promotion, funding, and
credentialing are more complex topics than ever, yet many individuals and
institutions rely on often outdated structures to assess the value and insights made
by these networked teams.

Collaborative digital humanities projects present ethically charged relationships
among non-tenure line and tenure line faculty, graduate and undergraduate students,
staff, and community stakeholders. Spencer D. C. Keralis’s blog post “Milking the Deficit Internship” describes the power dynamic
in this way: “Student labor in the classroom is never not coerced”
[Keralis 2016]. A range of knowledge stakeholders are now able to rethink the hierarchies
imposed by academic rank and hollow notions of prestige by forming systems that
emerge from new tools and methods. We believe this moment will allow humanities
scholars to shape a collaborative practice by balancing pedagogy and labor through
increased data collection within teams.

We have determined that collaboration should be locally-determined,
seamfully designed, and mutually productive, regardless of standing
within or without academic institutions; there must be an intentional ethics that is
both transparent and adaptive to the needs of the team. We wish to expose the seams
that knit technological infrastructure and academic assessment for both faculty and
students working on DH projects. In doing so, we borrow language from Matt Ratto’s
article “Ethics of Seamless Infrastructures” to think
critically about our use of technology in humanities scholarship and our
institutionalization of mentorship and credit allocation [Ratto 2007].
In an effort to best describe these relationships, we present a project-based
pedagogy that realigns academic hierarchies of prestige and oversight and reflects
the realities of scholarly labor: we suggest that, in the formation of collaborative
teams, digital humanists must recognize and explicitly foreground the constraints,
priorities, and shapes of our professional and institutional positions in order to
affect a purposeful pedagogy aligned with research. We will present several case
studies that cross between undergraduate and graduate pedagogies, public engagement,
business partnerships, scholarly community formation, and #alt-ac roles toward a
heterogeneous field of contributorship. We present, in other words, a species of
networked knowledge in practice. Our objective is to link discussions of what we
have come to call “social knowledge creation” with undergraduate
education to produce new ways of measuring, evaluating, and validating digital
scholarship.[2]

Students Rethought

Undergraduate digital scholarship in its current form can be a collaborative and
networked enterprise that involves multiple practitioners from a variety of
academic contexts. However, no great revolution in pedagogical practice is
needed; the tools and methods are before us. Socially oriented projects and
platforms within DH are evidence of this shift: Day of DH, Digital Humanities
Now, HASTAC, CenterNet, NINES, and DHSI are just a small sampling of community
minded approaches in DH. Efforts like these have sought to value social
knowledge creation by working to set the conditions for new discoveries in an
online social space.

Community formation lies at the base of our model, and successful scholarly
communities grow best when fostered by effective mentorship and collaboration.
Beyond Marc Prensky’s much popularized but widely discredited description of
students as “digital natives,” faculty must be ready to link
interpretative priorities with employability and an enduring value of education
through transferable, durable, and authentic skills [Prensky 2001].[3] The canon and critical thinking
skills once served this language of extensibility in education. Students must be
ready to work alongside faculty and staff; in so doing, they undoubtedly benefit
from discipline-specific expertise and embrace methods and skills that may not
be validated by the very institution that grants their degrees. Therefore, the
connection between technology and content must not be missed. There must be an
integral and functional connection between the technology, teaching, and team
integration. In “Digital Pedagogy Unplugged”, Paul
Fyfe recounts his surprise upon learning that “Jerome McGann does not especially like
computers”
[Fyfe 2011, 1]. The affordances of a multimedia hypertext were simply required to build
the Rossetti Archive; the ability to set text and image in a discoverable
interface was made possible by the internet. There is an emerging tension
between research-specific computing needs and, as Fyfe puts it, “opening those
projects to questions he had yet to imagine” through computing [Fyfe 2011, 1]. The symbiotic relationship between
intellectual curiosity and skills-based training in the humanities requires a
community of concerns bound by an evolving culture of exploration and
experimentation through method. This is a dialogue that should occur between
faculty, staff, and students in an ongoing basis during the development and
dissemination of in-process scholarly work. In a curricular context, this
interdependent relationship between student and instructor means that curricular
models aimed at including DH methods may not keep perfect pace with the
development of consumer products, technical standards, or open source projects.
Providing access to long lasting technical standards and active communities
supporting open source technologies that will remain after graduation must be
the goal of our training.[4]

Therefore, unlike a more global technical standard, we find that collaborative
models must be locally determined and agreed upon by local partners, often in an
ad hoc way. Bethany Nowviskie has described the “human
factors” of our “scholarly machine” and how,
even as we conceive of research in the humanities as operating at a great scale,
the collaborations themselves unfold on a closer, human scale: “Despite all the focus on cyberinfrastructure and
scholarly workflows, we’re fashioning ever closer, more intimate and
personalized systems of production”
[Nowviskie 2012]. The argument for a greater appreciation of the human scale of research
and teaching is the basis for an ethics of collaboration and validating digital
scholarship. In this context, Nowviskie’s reminder of human scale of research
and teaching also highlights a fundamental inconsistency within university
structures, for both faculty and students, that are often more interested in
statistical metrics of success.

For example, large archival and digitization projects across a range of
disciplines have outstripped the constraints of traditional tenure and promotion
timelines. Two notable examples of this disjunction between project development
and university standards could include The Map of Early Modern London (http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/),
which has been in development for over 10 years, and The Orlando Project (http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/orlando/), which has been in
development for over 20 years. In “Assessing the Future
Landscape of Scholarly Communication”, a report by The Center for
Studies in Higher Education, the authors seek to describe the pressures facing
faculty in collaborative digitally oriented teams and “to understand the needs and practices of faculty for
in-progress scholarly communication”
[Harley et al. 2010, 2]. Due to the increased time and collaboration required to create large
scale digital projects and the likelihood that these efforts may grow without
being “finished,” scholarly communication that occurs
in-progress is indeed becoming more prominent and bucks the traditional view
that knowledge is created when a monograph is printed and bound.[5] The report surveys a handful of
disciplines–archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and
political science–with a view to understanding the role of technology in
collaborative research and in-progress scholarly communication. The core concern
for the historians interviewed concerned the “crisis in monographic
publication,” which stems from both “cutting back the number of
books” published by high quality presses and the “glut of books”
produced by low market publishers in an attempt to satiate the “number of books required for advancement at competitive
universities”
[Harley et al. 2010, 436]. In all of this, the report recognizes that university libraries, facing
squeezed budgets, are incapable of purchasing these monographs, which further
deflates demand. In Open Access, Peter Suber has
even claimed that the rapid inflation of science based journal subscriptions has
caused a knock-on effect in humanities based monograph publishing because
university libraries are forced to maintain access to online subscriptions while
eroding the physical collection of books housed on campus [Suber 2012, 32]. The answer offered by the authors of the
report is in the successful collaborations revolving around “online databases of archival materials or data sets
built collaboratively by scholars”
[Harley et al. 2010, 471]. The crisis in scholarly publishing has been well documented in other
venues,[6] but the response to these pressures has
generated, by necessity, informal collaborations that have placed pressure on
students, staff, community partners, and other knowledge stakeholders.

By describing some of the pressures facing researchers, we have begun with a
very pragmatic, perhaps pessimistic, view of what David Berry called the
“computational turn” across disciplines, wherein “technologies [have shifted] the critical ground of
their concepts and theories”
[Berry 2011, 11]. Berry acknowledges that “... with card indexes dying a slow and
certain death… there remain few outputs for the non-digital scholar to
undertake research in the modern university,” but he extends the
consequences of this reality to the need to reimagine pedagogy and the social
function of a humanities education. No longer are the humanities tasked with
training students for civil participation through a national canon: students, he
suggests, “would need to be rethought”
[Berry 2011, 6]. Berry imagines a radical, deeply collaborative recentering that “...
would change our understanding of knowledge, wisdom and intelligence
itself,” a shift to “... a method of thinking with eyes and screen”
[Berry 2011, 10].

In keeping with Berry’s vision of a “collective intellect”
spurred by “... a society or association of actors who can think critically
together, mediated through technology,” the academy must rethink both
undergraduate and graduate students through the lens of a technologically
literate, socially participatory community. By validating digital scholarship
throughout the university, all research participants by better conceptualize how
pedagogy, labor, and contributorship overlap. Likewise, students must reimagine
their relationships and expectations for training, professionalization, and
future employment. The social aspect of DH becomes the basis for a community of
practice that respects the realities of international, networked, and hybrid
identities and cultures. Akin to the communities of practitioners that gather
online to support open source projects, DH has the potential to become a
community of lifelong learning for our students as participation in the
workforce will require near perpetual retraining. We are proposing a third space
within the university that is both beyond and between the experiences of
teaching and research. Understanding the cultural and social realities of online
community formation is a relatively new social function of the humanities, and
our collaborative work must similarly engage with these realities that face our
students, their employers, and the university itself.

Students require expertise that is adaptable, durable, and authentic.
Non-curricular experiences must thereby promote experimentation and open ended
play with technology. Skills acquisition should be part of a student’s outlook
toward any technical or cultural problem. Humanities students who embrace this
sensibility will, however, face an additional set of problems. The heterogeneous
nature of collaborative groups in the humanities means that competing values,
concerns, and responsibilities can result in tensions and misunderstandings
between Primary Investigators and funders, collaborating faculty and staff,
graduate and undergraduate students, and knowledge stakeholders and community
partners. Sheila Cavanagh observes in her recent article, “Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and Open
Access”, that “collaborative work has a different history in the
humanities than in the sciences and conventional reward structures in
humanistic disciplines do not always easily accommodate mutual
efforts”
[Cavanagh 2012]. Similarly, Amy E. Earhart cautions us against “[romanticizing] the lab. Science labs emphasize
collaboration, but hierarchies may be apparent”
[Earhart 2015, 393]. Social knowledge creation may include geographically disparate
contributors or clusters coming together through social collaboration
platforms.[7] The recent work by the digital humanities program at UCLA to
standardize student collaborator rights has helped to clarify the ethical
imperative for faculty who may be forced by the pressures of tenure and
promotion to emphasize scholarly output at the expense of sound pedagogy. Their
“Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” maintains
that “[c]ollaborations between students and more experienced
digital humanities practitioners should benefit everyone”
[Di Pressi et al.]. Similarly, the efforts of the Modern Language Association (MLA) gesture
toward a bridge between the concerns of faculty with those of students working
in a research context. The MLA’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital
Media (2012) recognises, for example, that digital scholarly
practitioners “engage in collaborative work” far more often than their
non-digital counterpart but stops short of recommending specific frameworks of
evaluation and peer review. Compounding the difficulties inherent in formally
evaluating digital research is the collaborative involvement of teaching
faculty, students, graduate researchers, cultural heritage professionals, etc.
The difficulties evaluators face is not limited to media type or form–archives,
blog posts, databases, and code bases are all up for consideration here–but also
encompasses disciplinary norms and shared authorship practices. Through the lens
of media and collaboration, we work to discuss and share guidelines that address
credit, mentorship frameworks, and scholarly merit for digital work in a
responsible way.

Non-mechanical Contributors

Ethically-framed interventions have long been part and parcel of theorized
pedagogies. We position bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress as a model for
classroom based community formation that negotiates class, race, and gender in
an inclusive and productive way [hooks 1994]. Our goal is to
extend this kind of “liberated classroom,” as hooks describes
it, into the research space and into the public space. Social relationships
forged beyond the classroom have guided pedagogies that carry the structural
oppressions from society into the classroom and, in our current concerns,
collaborative teams. As Brett Hirsch puts it in the introduction to Digital Humanities Pedagogy,
“bracketing” teaching away from research is particularly
dangerous [Hirsch 2012, 5]. Whether we are thinking about
tenure and promotion, course design, research activities, or the critical
discussion of pedagogy or experimental design, we risk marginalizing digital
humanities by not fully integrating our research practice within our teaching.
Perhaps more subtly, we risk transferring the hierarchy between student and
instructor by artificially partitioning teaching from research. Paulo Freire
remains instructive on this point:

The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and
libertarian pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first, the
oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit
themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the
reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases
to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the
process of permanent liberation.
[Freire 2005, 55]

We argue that theoretically informed interventions remain the source of
digital humanities work, but digital humanities must structure collaborative
work to reflect that ethics in a broader pedagogy. The slippage and breadth of
collective pronouns is a symptom of this broader problem of credit allocation.
As faculty, we must respect and include their behaviors, their view of the
world, and their own ethics. As students, we must work to liberate our education
from antiquated economic and institutional structures; we must liberate our
instructors from paper-based assessment that attempts to fix academic output as
a single assignment rather than a dynamic development process; by embracing a
collaborative, project based pedagogy, we must reject the simplistic
“‘banking’ concept of education” that presumes
education is deposited in the heads of students from a teacher [Freire 2005, 72]; we must liberate ourselves from traditional
and conservative models of education that are predicated on rarified access to
resources and information. The banking concept of education is invalidated by
the Open Access model that makes content free. When paired with similar Open
Source and Open Data movements, access to open standards and data allows
non-traditional scholars to participate like never before. As Freire reminds us,
true liberation comes when the oppressors as well as the oppressed are liberated
from the structural inequalities that propagate and reward hierarchies of
control and dominance. Teaching our students to build digital projects will
validate digital scholarship for faculty and staff as well. Crossing between
these spaces should not carry with it the hierarchies of the university's own
evaluative procedures.

Our ethics is split along the same discursive lines that divides the very term
digital humanities. Between the computational tools and the human understanding
of culture, there lies a split between the mechanical and the human that
animates our collaborative relationships. The UCLA “Student
Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” defines the necessity to pay students
for their work, arguing that an unpaid internship model should not merely
exchange experience or education for labor.[8] Work and education cannot enter into an economics of
exchange or gift because the value exchanged is simply too ephemeral, prone to
abuse, and reliant on hierarchies of authority between faculty, students, and
staff that are symptomatic of the old academy. The UCLA Bill of Rights explains
this division with a pragmatic sensibility: “If students have made substantive (i.e.,
non-mechanical) contributions to the project, their names should appear
on the project as collaborators, and they should be acknowledged in
subsequent publications that stem from the project”
[Di Pressi et al.]. Student labor and education should not become merely an extension of the
computational tools researchers are taking up. Large scale XML/TEI projects may
well be the most susceptible research method because of the labor required. The
extensibility of the language may become extended uncomfortably into our
pedagogy; the structural demands of encoding text re-encodes personal
relationships and builds a human ethics through the demands of the machine.
Jaron Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget does well to
describe how “the most important thing about technology is how it
changes people”
[Lanier 2010, 4]. While his argument is dystopian in tone and scope, Lanier rightly argues
that people sacrifice some portion of their intellect and their very humanity to
serve the limitations of computing. Teachers, as well as students, are
susceptible to the extensibility of this ethic. Digital humanities runs the
risks of translating the structural logic of the machine onto the human
experience of our students. People become the mere workings of the machines now
used for analysis and knowledge generation. For this reason, we suggest that
contributorship must be modeled on conditions and ethics that are inherited from
the humanities.

Narrative / History / Taxonomy

We must be ready to radically rethink authorship attribution through a more
narrative style of contributorship. Models of attribution from other
disciplines, in which tacit rules governing order of authorship may privilege
the Primary Investigator as the originator of insight, signal the contributions
of graduate students or lab directors, or present a simple alphabetized list, do
not translate well into digital humanities. Insights offered by constituent
partners–who may include undergraduates, graduate research assistants, #altac
staff, librarians, computer IT professionals–are essential for the functioning
of digital projects for both faculty and institutions. Ideas in a multimedia
environment are dependent on layers of software, mentorship, and methodology.
The next great insight may come from a unique moment of discovery couched in
mentorship, direction, and dialogue. Heterogeneous collaborations within
academic contexts help to define the value of publishing digital projects and
communicating them to the public.

Scholarly communication is bound up in several competing issues when done
collaboratively in a multimedia and multidisciplinary context. Authorship
occupies potentially-competing modes of credit and accountability. In
recognition of this tension, collaboration allows project contributors with
diverse expertise to define their roles and to apportion mutually-beneficial
responsibility. There are several models to document and attribute diverse
contributions made in a heterogeneous team. TaDiRAH and CrediT are two of the
most commonly discussed currently in digital humanities and scholarly
communication,[9] though it is
unclear just how often these taxonomies are employed (Brand). TaDiRAH cites the
Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) and The Digital
Research Tools project (DiRT) as employing the framework. Collaboration disrupts
existing models of authorship and attribution. Greater transparency is possible
with these taxonomies; however, collaborative teams evolve as expertise
increases and roles shift as students or faculty come in and out of the project.
Activity definitions, like those used by TaDiRAH represent just one side of the story that includes
contributor narrative statements and historical perspectives of the evolution of
roles as the overlap and shift over time. The humanities-specific logic of
history and narrative come to define our model.

As we discussed at the opening, our perspective emerged during our participation
in the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) hosted by the
Research Triangle of North Carolina from the 11th to the 15th of October, 2015.
Our discussions during this week centered on digital humanities work as a
community of practice, wherein the community is formed by the very methods and
techniques employed. TaDIRAH includes “community_building”
and “teaching_and_learning” in the taxonomy of activities,
but these roles do not map easily to student participation and define what
constitutes these acts. During the week at SCI, we were engaged on multiple
levels of community building and teaching and learning, but these activities
were difficult to capture in the current taxonomies. We turned to building a
timeline with Timeline.js to show how our thought evolved. We built a project site to capture
our collaboratively written white paper, which used Google Docs to shape our
team’s discussions. We strove to have our project site reflect the fluidity of
born digital content, which evinces different issues related to credit, to
valuing varied contributions, and the articulation of participation in our
thinking. The romantic ideal of the solitary genius and the writer in his garret
was transparent to us as we worked in a multimedia environment, rapidly picking
up tasks, and sharing information. The taxonomies of contributorship faded as we
grappled with collecting our conversation. The timeline of our thinking includes
tweets from group members and digital photographs of our activity, many of which
were taken by Eric Dye. We argue for a radical inclusiveness that recognises the
very real labor of contributors that may manifest in a variety of ways. This is
a model of digital scholarship that is interested in the big picture of academia
intersecting with the public and of pedagogy existing as research. Knowledge is
a networked thing, and conceiving of scholarship as an inherently collaborative
venture enriches the people and the products of any given field. Having begun
in-depth discussion of theoretical issues, we realised that our key insights to
discussions of how to evaluate digital work emerged from extensive practical
knowledge. To expand on those insights, we developed a number of project-based
case studies that highlighted the collaboration behind them. These case studies
might serve as models for further study to gain information on more widespread
practices in digital scholarship.

Layered Dependencies: DH Case Studies

With a desire to identify universal bridges between disciplines, we turned to
narrative case studies about four projects that involved our team members in a
range of capacities, including as facilitator, project manager, principal
investigator, and student collaborator. These case studies work from the
understanding that a granular approach to contribution, as would be captured in
a metric that simply counted GitHub commits, would not appreciate the
contributions of individuals who may have provided a critical insight or
discovery that shaped the evolution of our projects. We found that historical
accounting of activities helped lay bare the methodological decisions of each
group as they evolved. Our realization in our heterogeneous group was that there
are layers of dependences between technology and expertise that foregrounds
students, staff, and faculty roles in a highly variable way. We found that a
mentorship model that flattened hierarchies between participants allowed for a
fuller sense of participation and a holistic representation of the insights
offered by any one individual.

12th Street Project

The 12th Street
Project is a collaborative effort of the students and faculty at
Penn State Behrend. 12th Street emerges from three needs arising from the
students and faculty at the college. Hosted by the Penn State Digital
Humanities Lab, 12th Street collects the history, culture, and contemporary
voices of those living in Erie, PA. The project takes its name from an
industrial corridor in Erie that has been lined with factories and
businesses throughout the region’s history. We take 12th Street as a
microcosm of the social, cultural, and economic forces that have shaped the
region since the mid-19th century. Together we are charting the history of
the region in an effort to imagine its potential futures. Developed on Omeka
and the Neatline add-on, 12th Street is a local geographical history of the
region that appeals to a global audience. The campus has recently developed
an undergraduate major program in Digital Media, Arts, and Technology,
otherwise known as DIGIT. The program positions undergraduate research
opportunities at the core of the curriculum and necessitates open and
dynamic collaboration. The major is organized around four media specific
concentrations that include text analysis, sound design and film production,
data visualization, and modeling and simulation. 12th Street is capable of
accommodating a wide range of multimedia contributions and maintain
coherence through its dedication to explaining the relationship between
space and place as well as culture and economy. The project is intended to
grow organically with the interests of participating faculty and students.
An emphasis on creative works may emerge with the contributions of
participating creative writing faculty, or an emphasis on visual history may
develop over time with the contributions of our arts and humanities faculty
and students.

For example, Eric Dye’s contributed a review and analysis of the history of
the locomotive industry in Erie through a juxtaposition of images from the
past and present. Local public library archives, as well as community and
company materials, have become resources to help frame the cultural impacts
of the 1853 Erie Gauge War or more recent attempts to move the engine
manufacturing industry to tax and labor friendly jurisdictions. This
contribution also includes interviews, newspapers, maps, and economic census
data. By contrast, “The Masonic Temple as a Microcosm of
Erie History” is another multimedia submission that Bridget
Jenkins has developed. It encompasses a visual and textual report that
detailed how the Erie Masonic Temple’s survival and development represents a
template for the evolution of the city and the region. Jenkins encountered
difficulties in finding a relevant original documentation, so she began
networking outside of the library system. Eventually, she connected with an
individual within one of the Temple’s Masonic bodies that had collected
documents throughout the years in an aim to have the Temple listed as a
historic site. This documentation, combined with the other minimal
information she had scrounged from the libraries and online, provided her
with the foundation for her project. She then contributed photographs and a
personal narrative of what the building looks like today. Joining the
historical documents with the present conditions enabled her to explain a
narrative of the broader social and cultural importance of the building.
Because Eric came to his contributions with a pre-existing expertise in
photography, his methodological focus embraced photography. Jenkins came to
her research with a robust background in journalism and public scholarship.
She was able to locate unique resources by directly engaging with knowledge
stakeholders and current users of the space. While Dye and Jenkins worked on
their own component of the project, they were able to chart each other’s
progress on Yammer and celebrate each other’s milestones. In this way, the
faculty lead, Aaron Mauro, describes himself as laying out the canvas that
will become the big-tent of DH at the undergraduate level. Students are
responsible for completing projects in a fluid and additive way. They each
pull up poles to support the larger structure. Through their individual
efforts, they build a community of practice that shifts and evolves with the
interests of the student contributors and the skills offered by faculty
teaching at Behrend.

Digital Scudéry

Digital Scudéry is an interdisciplinary, interdivisional
collaboration at the College of Wooster that will result in digitally
transcribed textual surrogates for five of Madelaine de Scudéry’s late
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century books. The end result of the
project is not conceived as a digital edition per se, but as a version of de
Scudéry’s Conversations that students can (1)
read more easily than they can images of the printed books and (2) encode
with research-based XML tags using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards.
The project began with a pedagogical challenge: both the seventeenth-century
French and the unfamiliar typography offered challenges to Laura Burch’s
students, the latter of which was a distraction from the pedagogical
efficacy of the former. By bringing this pedagogical question to Jacob Heil,
then The Ohio Five’s Digital Scholar, working under the auspices of an
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant to help faculty with digital pedagogical
projects, Prof. Burch kicked off a process that would come to involve
multiple faculty, staff, and student partners.

The first phase of the project involved four students’ transcriptions of the
first book of de Scudéry’s Conversations,
comprised of two volumes, approximately 400 pages apiece. In attempts to
mitigate the tedium of transcription Burch designed revolving student
pairings so that they might practice their acquisition of French while
cross-checking their transcriptions by reading aloud to their partners over
Google Hangouts. The team of students–Shelby Stone (Wooster ‘15), Marie
Schroder (‘17), Jennifer Filak (‘16), and Grace Gamble (‘17)–also worked in
Basecamp so that they might raise questions about transcription publicly;
Burch, Heil, and Stephen Flynn (at the time, Wooster’s Emerging Technologies
LIbrarian) found in these questions opportunities to discuss editorial
practice, the idiosyncrasies of books made during the handpress period of
printing, and about structured markup. Regarding the latter of these, Flynn
designed a “pre-TEI” workflow so that students would have
a gentle introduction to angle brackets without getting in the way of the
transcription itself. The students were exposed to light markup that Flynn
then transformed into valid TEI via scripts and ported it into an interface
like TEI Boilerplate. Finally, a senior computer science student was hired
for a few weeks simply to explore TEI Boilerplate: Douglas Code was tasked
only with exploring creative, project-specific hacks to the Boilerplate code
and in his brief time on the project was able to create a table of contents
to facilitate ease of reading.

At its outset, then, Digital Scudéry was a partnership between student
editors transcribing the text, a librarian creating a technical framework, a
student coder/hacker, a faculty member, and the Five Colleges’ Digital
Scholar. To this point, Heil had been framing the project at the topmost
level by suggesting tools and frameworks like TEI and Basecamp, and by
guiding overall project timelines based on planning meetings, expressed
goals, and local resources. For his part the project was an experiment
designed to help us walk through the role of TEI in our transcription
projects on the Liberal Arts campus. Additionally, however, Heil was also
attempting to find partners in computer science who might save the project
from manual transcription by tailoring the optical character recognition
(OCR) workflows designed as a part of the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) at
Texas A&M University. Professor Sofia Visa introduced an optional
assignment in her machine learning class and recruited Will Rial, a rising
senior at Wooster who worked over the summer tailor these workflows. (Rial
has presented talks and posters and has a forthcoming publication on his
design.) Next steps for the project will include close collaboration between
Rial and a French Language and Literature student to further refine the OCR
outputs so that the final four books in de Scudéry’s oeuvre can be OCR’d
effectively. The result of the project is not just machine- and
human-readable texts, but it will also contribute to the digital humanities
world’s knowledge base on the OCR technologies and processes that are
essentially to freeing the millions of pages of human cultural artifacts
from the digital images on which they are preserved.

While Digital Scudéry will result in digital,
pedagogically useful texts for Professor Burch to use in her courses–her
initial goal–it additionally demonstrates an ethically motivated and no less
expedient series of collaborations. In the aforementioned partnership
between libraries, students, faculty members, and an #altac facilitator,
each party brought their expertise to the table and, importantly, informed
the project’s processes in meaningful ways. Additionally, Heil sought an
opportunity for a “coincidental collaboration” in which
Visa and Rial could use data from Burch et al. to inform their project, the
result of which would benefit Burch’s original pedagogical goal without
rendering this goal dependent upon the results of the computer science
intervention. That is to say that two viable digital, pedagogical projects
worked along parallel paths, along which each stakeholder contributed her or
his creative and specialized solution to the research questions at hand.
Along the way, Digital Scudéry will have deliverables: preservation-quality
TEI documents, the potential for a digital edition of Scudéry’s work,
machine-readable text that can be utilized in the classroom for pedagogical
experiments in text mining, introductory TEI workflows for encoding
projects, OCR processes for printed seventeenth-century French books, and
post-processing scripts to clean the OCR output. The project also
exemplifies ethical interdisciplinary, interdivisional collaborations at two
different scales while it introduces more possibilities for collaboration in
the near term: Heil hopes to fold the lessons learned into processes that
can result in whole-campus collaborations that formally knit together
faculty teaching, student research, and library and educational
technologies’ technical acumen. It is a version of interdisciplinary
collaboration that is facilitated at the level of an academic
superstructure–here, the Ohio Five, the library, the Ed Tech division–rather
than at the level of individual faculty researcher(s).

ReKN

The Renaissance Knowledge
Network (ReKN) is a major scholarly initiative designed to augment
digital scholarship in early modern studies by developing an integrated
research, analysis, and production environment. It is based at the
Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (University of Victoria) and has been
developed in partnership with Iter (University of Toronto Scarborough); ReKN
also works closely with the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Project
(Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Major Collaborative
Research Initiative) and the Advanced Research Consortium (Texas A&M
University). Led jointly by Dr Raymond G. Siemens (Canada Research Chair in
Humanities Computing and Distinguished Professor of English and Computer
Science at the University of Victoria) and Dr William R. Bowen (Director of
Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance and Chair of the Department
of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough), it is
a network of researchers, projects, and resources dedicated to sharing and
disseminating digital resources related to early modern studies.

ReKN, as both a potential scholarly platform and, more importantly, an
intellectual community, is devoted to understanding, critiquing, and
building digital projects for the study of the Renaissance. These aims
ensure that the scope and significance of individual and institutional
contributions are maximised across the scholarly community of interest. ReKN
directly addresses the growing challenge of diverse, isolated, and siloed
digital resources by building a scholarly environment explicitly tailored to
the needs of humanities scholars studying the Renaissance. ReKN seeks to
bring existing scholarly resources and methods into conversation by
integrating research, discovery, exploration, analysis, and visualisation.
ReKN will take shape at the intersection of the initiatives, projects, and
trends outlined above, providing a single point of entry into an entire
galaxy of scholarly activity, specialised for and oriented to scholars of
the Renaissance. It is a resource for searching and discovering, for
analysing and exploring, and for publishing and writing. And in all of these
diverse activities we are cognisant of the many ways the community is
formed, collaboration occurs, and research is shared and debated. ReKN is
being developed from its inception to encompass the ways that not only
researchers interact with each other, but the many ways in which digital
resources and tools benefit from interoperability and cross communication.
ReKN is at once a unique technological resource, a focal point for diverse
digital resources, and a community–of individuals, of practice, and of
scholarly work. It is a social, scholarly working environment and a
community of users, researchers, developers, the public, datasets, projects,
publications, and networks.

Over the past year, the ReKN team was distributed amongst several time zones
and institutions, with many members of the team frequently on the road for
conference travel. While this afforded some benefits, it also produced
difficulties in communication and decision making. Skype conferences, for
example, were difficult to schedule between Europe, Toronto, and Victoria,
and as a result were usually several hours in length when finally scheduled.
We also found that different work styles and personalities made project
coordination difficult at times, especially as concerned software and
platform deliverables. We also found that the local and individual needs of
the graduate students hired as research assistants often meant that they did
not want to intellectual “own” the project. The issues
faced by the project with regard to geographical distance and community
development is evidence of how a project, with the stated goal of community
formation, must actively work to shape that culture internally. The
collaborative cultures that we attempt to build on platforms like ReKN must
be echoed in the teams that develop the software as well.

Life Renewed

The Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State
University Vancouver (WSUV) has a strong outreach mission, due partly to the
WSUV’s status as a land grant institution and partly to the tight knit
community that helped to found the university a mere 26 years ago. Since the
introduction of the Senior Capstone course (DTC 497) to the curriculum in
summer 2007, graduating seniors have learned to apply their technological
and essential skills to the production of media objects for local non-profit
organizations and businesses. To date, students have produced websites,
apps, interactive exhibits, videos, digital marketing materials, and 2D and
3D animations for the Council of the Homeless, the Boys and Girls Club,
Ridgefield School District, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, the Oregon Museum for
Science and Industry, Mount St. Helens
Science and Learning Center at Coldwater Station, the YWCA, Vancouver
Business Journal, iQ
Credit Union, and others. Of these Life Renewed,
the project produced in fall 2014 for the Mount St. Helens Science and
Learning Center at Coldwater Station, stands out as most representative of
the kind of project that best reflects the way digital humanities work
collaboratively with other fields to produce a meaningful experience aimed
at fostering learning through sound pedagogy.

Tasked with telling the story of the plants and animals that have returned to
Mount St. Helens since the 1980 eruption, the 23 students in this course
began, in August 2014, to research interactive installations relating to
environmental phenomena. Exploring science museums, educational facilities,
art galleries, and museums from around the world, they assembled a
collection of 50 exhibits. They studied these examples using the constraints
provided them by the scientists at the Station (e.g. size, portability, wide
audience interest) developing a comparative analysis that captured the
students’ observations. The next stage of the project’s development had them
creating their own exhibit. Using their research, students prepared a
proposal for the way in which their exhibit would look and function and
delivered this proposal to the scientists in a formal presentation. The end
product was the “Life Renewed,” an educational
environment that includes a mobile app and an interactive installation that
provides a 3D simulated flyover of the volcano, two augmented reality
banners that reveal 2D hand-made illustrations and 3D animation models, and
a touch screen interface for identifying plants and animals found on the
mountain.

Once the scientists accepted the students’ plan, production on the exhibit
began. The students assembled into four teams based on interests and skills:
1) Animation/Video/GIS, 2) Augmented Reality/Interface Design, 3) Web and
Mobile, and 4) Digital Marketing and Promotions. Each team worked to develop
their own portion of the project, interacting with the scientists and other
teams as they created their digital artifacts. Using GIS data, the Animation
Team mapped 289 square miles of the volcano in 3D and created a game
simulation in which visitors to the exhibit take the persona of a raven
flying over the various terrains of Mount St. Helens and observing the
animals and plants of that specific area of rebirth. Students also produced
hand-made 3D animations of the animals and 2D scientific illustrations of
the plants used for the augmented reality environment. The students on the
Web and Mobile team built the computer used to power the simulation and
produced a large screen and mobile version of it. The Design Team made the
augmented reality banners and produced the educational booklet that
accompanied the exhibit to be made available to visitors at the Station. The
Digital Marketing Team developed and maintained the website that documents
the production of the project and hosts many of its assets. Once completed,
the exhibit was installed at the Station in celebration of the 35th
anniversary of the eruption and remained on site until August 2015. So
successful was this project that it won two 1st place awards for
undergraduate research and has continued to be exhibited at events, like the
recent Portland mini-Maker Faire (Oregon Museum for Science and Industry,
September 2015) and Girlfest (Girl Scouts of Oregon and SW Washington,
October 2015). While students came to this project with strong technological
skills, what they learned in the process of producing the exhibit was how to
work collaboratively on teams, to communicate in both written and oral
contexts effectively to a variety of audiences––from students, to
scientists, to the public––and solve a real-world problem that came with a
healthy amount of responsibility and stress. These are the skill sets that
help them stand out on the job market and explains why the hiring rate for
the program stands at 90%. More importantly, students learn first hand what
it means to be part of a community. The team structure encourages this
understanding at a micro level as students working with other students, but
the collaboration with one another, the faculty, and the scientists to build
something of intellectual value for the public teaches students what it
means to be citizens of the world.

Revealing the Seams

In large part, the challenges to new systems of evaluation and credit are not
technological or infrastructural per se. Instead, they are social, habituated by
longstanding disciplinary norms and expectations. They are deeply embedded in
administrative norms and processes, from informal expectations to the literal
paperwork used within universities. They find expression in tenure and promotion
guidelines or traditions that ignore or disincentivize collaborative work and
processes, frame digital scholarship as service, or overemphasize the
“final product” of digital scholarship. In evaluation
frameworks like the Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom or the
Excellence in Research for Australia, we can observe the nationalization of
these standards in an attempt to repatriate scholarship into the limited roles
of training a citizenry, which continue to overvalue monographs in rigid
point-based systems that determine funding. We see these disciplinary norms in
requirements for depositing dissertations as PDFs that often preclude digital
work outside that limiting file format. The habits of student evaluation and
curriculum development further disincentivize faculty from engaging their
students in collaborative teams and training undergraduates and graduates to
complete digital projects. Students see faculty trumpeting the arrival of their
new book and using it as a calling card for their expertise, while eliding the
pressures of tenure and promotion. Finally, students run the risk of emulating
these worn out modes of scholarly communication and sacrificing their education
to repeat the cycle.

Through our case studies, we hope to narrativize how a project's processes,
participation patterns, and outcomes can cast these formally and informally
institutionalized values in relief. At its core, the approach is humanistic: we
tell the stories of our projects in an attempt to glimpse the connectedness that
holds true collaboration and ethical distribution of credit as a core value. Our
case studies bring to light our attempts at flattened hierarchies and, within
such a two-dimensional model, the sites of overlapping knowledge and abilities
that are sewn together into the fabric of our projects. To return to Ratto’s
terminology, our approach embraces its “seamfulness”
[Ratto 2007]. The seamlessness of contemporary consumer
electronics contains a rhetoric that elides the process of development, which we
argue is the key moment when new knowledge and insights are created. By
embracing the collaborative development as a core concern for digital humanities
pedagogy and research, we reject the consumerist privileging of a final product
and embrace an evolving model of social knowledge creation. As a development
ethos guiding projects, Chalmers and Galani describe an approach to interface
that “involves deliberately revealing seams to users, and
taking advantage of features usually considered as negative or
problematic”
[Chalmers and Galani 2004, 1]. For our purposes, the seam is not a failure but a redoubling that
results from layered, overlapping systems; our seams strengthen rather than
weaken interpersonal signals. Nevertheless, the seams are sites of contestation
in both Chalmers’s formulation and our adaptation thereof: in both instances,
the seam troubles the system and are “negative or
problematic.” Ratto pushes the logic of seamfulness
into an ethical domain by highlighting how consumers of seamless electronics
become “passive agents”
[Ratto 2007, 24], who are unable to modify or repair the technology they purchase. The
ethics of seamlessness is an ethic of disempowerment. When we elide the seams
between teaching and research, our students become passive agents and mere
consumers of education. Giving them the awareness of the seams between teaching
and research allows them to take agency of their education.

As we think through the utility seamful design, there is a danger in adopting
tantalizingly figurative formulations: “Seamfully integrated tools would maintain the unique
characteristics of each tool, through transformations that retained
their individual characteristics”
[Chalmers and Galani 2004, 2]. While we certainly want to celebrate our “unique
characteristics,” the metaphor implies a problematic association
between the computational tools and those who use them. We want to continue to
push against that gadgetization of human contributorship that Lanier laments and
adapt a model that lays bare human networks of overlapping agency, displaying
the joints where our projects become knit together. Dean Rehberger, the Director
of Matrix at Michigan State University, has helpfully defined Digital Humanities
as quilting [Rehberger 2014].[10]
Perhaps, if we stretch the needlecraft metaphor even further, we might think of
it instead as a motley patchwork of projects that comprise the canvas for our
big tent view of DH. We can strengthen that fabric with intentional, ethically
designed knowledge networks that, when viewed through a humanistic lens, get us
closer (as a large community of practice) to evaluative structures that allow
for responsible, care-full accreditation and that foster intentional growth
rather than sprawl.

Notes

[1] We have used the Taxonomy of Digital
Research Activities in the Humanities (TaDiRAH) to describe our
contributions to this article. Please find the full reference of activities
here: https://github.com/dhtaxonomy/TaDiRAH/blob/master/reference/activities.md
This taxonomy was brought to our collective attention at the 2015 Scholarly
Communication Institute by the “Modeling contributorship
with TaDiRAH” team, comprised of Cassidy Sugimoto, J. Britt
Holbrook, Korey Jackson, Zach Coble, April Hathcock, and Micah
Vandegrift.

[1] In Communities of Practice: Learning,
Meaning, and Identity, Etienne Wenger posits a social theory of
learning advanced by the formation of communities of practice. Wegner argues for
“three dimensions of the relation by which practice is the source of
coherence of a community”: “mutual engagement… a joint enterprise … a
shared repertoire.”
[Wenger 1998]

[2] We have worked to extend John Maxwell’s definition of
“open scholarship” in “Beyond Open
Access to Open Content” to imagine open access publishing alongside
social media and collaborative practices [Maxwell 2015].

[3] Even as the term “digital native” became
anchored in common terminology, contemporary criticism of the coining
remains as clear and important then as now: Timothy VanSlyke’s “Some Thoughts from the Generation Gap” in The Technology Source (2003) offers an even handed
rebuttal to the initial enthusiasm for the term. Somewhat tellingly, the
conversation about the term occurred largely in blogs, like that of Henry
Jenkins. His post “Reconsidering Digital Natives”
(2007), on his blog Confessions of an Aca-fan,
does a remarkable job of laying bare the assumptions that Prensky uses to
form his rough analogy between digital nativists and immigrants. By 2011,
Michael Thomas was able to edit an anthology tasked with Deconstructing Digital Natives. The term had
become myth and now required a more thorough rereading as a corrective to
the popular uptake of the term.

[4] Miriam Posner shares a similar sentiment in a
blog post entitled, “Money and
Time”: “We want to believe that we can be agile and
innovative, like Silicon Valley says it is, by making DH run with
short-term grants, app contests, and temporary labor. We want to have a
sort of Uber-style sharing economy for DH-research. But this is not how
one supports careful, enduring scholarship and teaching.”

[5]
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, Journal of Digital Humanities, and DH
Commons all accept research that is in-progress. The expectation
of a completed project, as one would expect a completed and static
monograph, is simply not possible. Susan Brown et al., in “Published Yet Never Done,” describes this reality
in relation to the long development and evolution of the Orlando Project
[Brown et al. 2009].

[6] This is a well worn genre within scholarly communication, but
a range of concerns persist, from tenure and promotion committees,
institutional reform, and the economics of publishing: Jennifer Wolfe
Thompson’s “The Death of the Scholarly Monograph in the
Humanities? Citation Patterns in Literary Scholarship” details
the relationship between publications through tenure and promotion processes
in particular [Thompson 2007], Blaise Cronin and Kathryn La
Barre’s “Mickey Mouse and Milton: book publishing in the
humanities”” has offered an analysis of institutional language
supporting the monograph [Cronin and La Barre 2004], and Carlos J. Alonso
et al., in a proceedings published by the American Council of Learned
societies, “Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of
Scholarly Publishing,” describe the problem as both an issue of
university self-governance, peer review, and economic factors [Alonso et al. 2003].

[7] The drafting of this article was made possible by the Slack
platform. However, members of this team have used Yammer and Basecamp to
similar success in linking teams through the logic and interface of social
media.

[8] Sean Michael Morris and Jesse
Stommel have also drafted a “Bill of Rights and
Principles for Learning in the Digital Age” that works to
enshrine the quality and care of face-to-face education in an online
environment like MOOCs. While this Bill of Rights is critical for students
and faculty to enshrine pedagogical values like openness and inclusivity in
an online environment, this document does not focus directly on the
collaborative project based methods of many digital humanities. We also are
not concerned with politically motivated “academic bills of
rights” that seek “to end the political abuse of the university and to
restore integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit
of knowledge”
[Academic Bill of Rights]. These rights are promoted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a
conservative think tank, which seeks to depoliticize education with the goal
of promoting racist, classist, and sexist policies [David Horowitz Freedom Center]. We highlight these viewpoints to express how
politicised the “rights” of students has become and how
online environments are proving to be a point of contention from several
perspectives.

[10] Dean Rehberger defined digital
humanities during the 2014 Day of DH in the following way: “Metaphorically
it is like making quilts: it takes many hands, it is about making, it is
about reuse & remix, it is an art & science, and while devalued
by some it is ultimately empowering and transformative” (http://dayofdh2014.matrix.msu.edu/members/deanreh/).